It's been a while since I've blogged (!) I got locked out for ages, but the events of this week have spurred me on to get back in........
Still reeling from the result in the States
this week I am reminded of the work I did on behavioural economics. The fact
that people are more motivated by fear of loss than the prospect of gain. Any
campaign that plays on people's fears, that focuses on the negative rather than
the positive, whether we like it or not, will often be more effective than
the positive campaigning we all crave.
For those who haven't read it I recommend Drew
Watson "The
Political Brain" - he goes into more detail about political motivation generally.
For most of my adult life I have believed that
what happened in Nazi Germany couldn't happen again - and certainly not here.
In a few short months that certainty has been challenged. The outpouring of
hatred in the lead up to and post Brexit, the legitimisation of attitudes and
behaviours that people previously would have been too ashamed to share openly,
is very scary.
The fact that an openly racist, xenophobic,
misogynist, sexist, sociopath could be elected to the most powerful role in the
world makes me wonder what has happened to the values which should underpin
democracy regardless of political persuasion. Decency, respect, honour,
service. I have to come back to the power of fear in motivating people who
would otherwise see themselves as decent, respectable and honourable, to
respond to a narrative that blames the other, rather than blaming the real
authors of their situation.
Since Brexit I have been horrified at some of
the openly racist and xenophobic diatribe being vented daily, in the media, on radio phone ins and on the street. As someone who enjoys Stephen Nolan’s programme on 5 Live I
have so often listened in disbelief at such attitudes being openly expressed.
Recently I had to phone in after someone responding to our decision to take a
few unaccompanied minors from Calais, said ‘we don’t want them here, the
flotsam and jetsam of society’. When I got through they asked me not to quote
him on the radio as they didn’t want such racist sentiments repeated.
So now I worry about what will happen to those
who are ‘other’ in the US. Here we have seen a huge increase in Islamophobic
and racist attacks. I also wonder how I would feel, perhaps as a Mexican,
knowing that my neighbours had voted for someone who sees me as a rapist?
I know it’s not as simple as that, I know many
people voted for Trump for other reasons that mattered more to them, such as
wanting conservatives appointed to the Supreme Court, or hating Hillary so much
Trump seemed the lesser of two evils. They may have done so holding their
noses, but still - give legitimacy to the basest of human instincts.
There is really no alternative to democracy,
but we must surely recognise that in order to work it must be underpinned by
values of decency, respect, honour and service to all. The alternative is the legitimised
oppression of the minority by the majority, the weak by the strong, the poor by
the rich.
With Trump in the West and Putin in the East,
the rise of the far right (look how buoyed up Marine la Pen was by the result)
in Western and Eastern Europe, we must all continue to do what we can to
challenge a world view that has the potential to take us all back to 1939. To
recognise that there is one race, the human race, to build bridges not walls. A
friend once said ‘we must learn to live together or we will die together’, that
sentiment has never been more true.
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